Consumer products are manufactured on high-speed production lines. A production line typically includes a series of steps or stations at which different portions of the consumer product are made and/or modified. These steps are often accomplished at the highest possible speed, so as to achieve a high output and low production costs. Yet it is still desirable to maintain the required quality standards for the consumer product. As such, high-speed production lines typically include a means of inspecting the completed consumer product(s).
Manual or digital inspection of every single product at the end of a high-speed production line may be inefficient for a number of reasons. First, it is time consuming to inspect each and every consumer product that comes off of a high-speed production line. Indeed, it oftentimes is simply impractical. One solution to this problem is to manually or digitally inspect a sampling of the consumer product. However, use of this approach ultimately may mean that that some faulty consumer products escape the inspection process and/or faulty products are not identified until it is too late to correct outages along the production line. This can result in whole batches of faulty consumer products, which may not be marketable “as is.”
Consumer products made along high-speed production lines include pouches that are used to package household care compositions such as laundry or dish detergent. The current pouches on the market include single compartment pouches as well as multi-compartment pouches, which are collectively referred to herein as “unit dose pouches.” The compartments are manufactured along high-speed production lines using platens comprising a series of mold cavities into which water-soluble film is drawn and is deformed such that it takes the cavity's shape. The resulting compartments may then be sealed to form a single-compartment pouch or at least a portion of a multi-compartment pouch. In this way, multiple unit dose pouches are made simultaneously. If at least one of those unit dose pouches is defective, the composition may leak, causing contamination of the production line and/or other unit dose pouches.